[Nottingham] Good bash meeting - thx Martin

[Martin]

msemtd at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
> Enjoyable meeting last night - thanks Martin -- I especially enjoyed the 
> raucous laughter when I asked if bash had associative arrays :) -- remember 
> Martin's mantra: "bash is /not/ a programming language".

Well, that depends on your definition and perhaps should be qualified!

In Turing Machine terms, then it certainly is programming.

In clean programming terms, I consider bash to be nearer to that of a 
'Job Control Language' that has had various higher level language ideas 
very inconsistently bolted on as an 'afterthought'.

Having said that, once you've suffered the time to learn the 
inconsistencies and historical hangups, it does let you do most 'system 
admin' things that you need to do fairly easily.


The format of the talk did stray very nicely into a very 'interactive' 
session. I learnt a few snippets and I hope it was useful to all.

Also, a big welcome to the Loughborough(?) contingent, and best wishes 
for expanding the LUGs.


> Brief notes: the Robin Tux logo with added beer is available as zipped GIMP 
> XCF from http://nottingham.pm.org/robin-tux.zip -- the "Friar Tux" logo is 
> underway!

To be added into our website continued revampings.



As promised, a few links following on from the Bash talk (pt 2)

Bash summary
http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org/wiki.php?title=Bourne-Again_shell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash

GNU Bash
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/

The Bash Reference Manual
http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bash.html

Bash FAQ, version 3.26, for Bash version 2.05b
ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/FAQ


'Tutorials'

Advanced Bash Scripting Guide
http://freshmeat.net/projects/advancedbashscriptingguide/

A quick guide to writing scripts using the bash shell
http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~elflord/unix/bash-tute.html

Getting Started with Bash :: A Bash Tutorial
http://www.hypexr.org/bash_tutorial.shtml

Bash by example, Part 1
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-bash.html



Hope you all enjoyed the talk,

Have fun,
Martin


-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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